How to watch sports without sports

Posted Thursday, March 19, 2020, at 3:54 PM

You know what, I’ll just flat out say it, not having any live sports right now stinks. There’s nothing to go cover, nothing to take photographs of and nothing to live tweet. Unless anyone wants to see live tweeting of a Counter Strike: GO (video game, by the way). I doubt there’s a long list for that one.

Anyways, how can we, a sports loving group of people who have no referees to currently complain about, fill the void that has been left by a lack of sports right now?

There are a few different ways to go ahead and fill the void. This might or might not be a two part column depending on everything that comes to mind, but let’s take a shot and see how we can watch sports without sports going on. (Did that make sense? No?)

As a new subscriber of YouTube TV, bye-bye Hulu Live, I’ve noticed they have a few more sports channels. One of them is NBA TV. Every time I’ve glanced at what they have on, it’s old NBA Finals contests and will probably change by the time someone reads this.

While watching old games might seem lame because you know the outcome, if it’s a particularly great game, it’s exciting to revisit what made that game so special in the first place. From a heroic effort by a singular player, a coach getting upset at a bad call or just a fantastic back and forth contest, it’s not the worst thing to revisit history.

ESPNU has been showing old college basketball games. The other night I found myself watching the 2015 Big 12 Title game between Iowa State and Kansas. I forgot how great that game was, and found myself actually getting mad about the poor first half from Iowa State.

Though the game was five years ago, I was mad. You do the math if I like Iowa State that much or loathe the Kansas Jayhawks to that extent. (Spoiler: It’s both!)

The ACC Network has been showing football games. ESPN puts out a daily content list for their two main channels. NFL free agency has been spicy in its early stages so their talking heads are going nuts about that.

Fox Sports 1 has been showing XFL games about every single time I take a look. ESPN+, which is a paid subscription service, has every 30 For 30 if you’re into those. Which, honestly, you should be. A lot of fantastic stuff there.

There’s also YouTube to check out a lot of older games. There are some channels dedicated to uploading older games from college football, basketball, NFL, NBA and the list goes on. If you want to watch Michael Jordan dominate the Phoenix Suns in the early 90s? Pretty sure there’s a channel for that.

Want to see amazing NCAA Tournament games again? There’s a channel for that. I finished reading a book last week, ‘The Last Great Game’ by Gene Wojciechowski, that chronicled the 1992 Elite 8 game between Duke and Kentucky. I wanted to watch it, searched it on YouTube, and found it pretty quickly.

And there’s always the various top highlights of whatever you want to see. The top 15 times a fan got popped in the face by accident? Yeah, it’s there. Top 10 dropped passes? Totally there. NFL Films has a channel that uploads their top 10 shows and A Football Life.

The best part of YouTube? It’s all free. Not a dime to be paid to witness anything on there. Unless you just really, really hate Google, there isn’t a reason to not use the service in our time of need.

I joked about this the other day on Twitter, but there’s also another way to watch, and even play sports. Video games. And you know what? There’s so much there that it’ll be in the next edition of View from the nose bleeds.